More on that last thing

I have a friend who doesn’t have a phone. We’re not old best chums or anything like that, and his lack of electronic communications makes it difficult for our relationship to progress. I basically have to hope to run into him at bars. Still – I envy him, not only for his ability to avoid me.

I got some bad news the other day, so I left my phone at home, went running, ran errands, ignored it for a while. An old acquaintance (I have no other term; I can’t believe a friend would behave thus) was pissed at me, having tried to txt msg me all day to ask me to hang out. Kerfuffle ensued.

I feel too connected sometimes.

I teach a class, and in this class I teach students to make comic books and digital videos. One student – not my favorite – after skipping all the class’s work, wrote a nice final exam in an attempt to… something. For good measure, he tacked on a part railing about the class. The gist: how dare I pretend that I teach a progressive class when we made such politically impotent texts. Comics? Commercials? Piffle! I suppose probably should have had them doing something that would have motivated real change – reading Marx or Chomsky or Foucault, I suppose. The commercial his group filmed made fun of methamphetamine users.

When I get a message like that, I usually use it as an opportunity to open a dialogue, but this kid was only in my class that one term – trying to make up credit from before – so I didn’t write back to him on his final. Had I, I might have told him not to confuse the message with the medium. The parody of a Mark Foley campaign ad was super, as were a number of send-ups of tele-consumerism. Comics – I just re-read this in Art Spiegelman’s In the Shadow of No Towers – are not a genre.

Neither is the internet.

So, to balance my Facebook bashing – I wish someone would comment on my status – I want to point out that I just looked up “kerfuffle” (and variants “kerfluffle” with an extra “l,” “carfuffle” with a “car,” along with numerous other variations and the etymology of both) before I trusted myself to use it above.

I also downloaded the complete text to Shirley Jackson’s “The Lottery” and the video of same from some old-timey TV show. I’m talking lesson plans here for my unit on textual adaptation.

I love being constantly connected. I want all the information in the world at my finger tips. I don’t want to miss it, or anything. I don’t want to be bothered either, and I can’t say how this connectivity has made my life any better in a liberationist politico sort of way.

I’m starting to wonder if it’s a problem of personification. We think of the internet as a thing. A vaguely anthropomorphized thing. Not big brother, altho so were big brother a mining engineer, but something with a brain that does things somehow on its own. It’s not a thing, not a monolithic one. Sure, there’s the superhighway, but that’s quite literally just the medium, the thing through which all these channels of information are channeled. The content is, the purposes we put it to, are of our own devising. We can drive to the hoe-down or the symphony or the store. We can talk about our gardens or the internet. So, what is it that pisses me off here? I’ve met the internet… and it’s us.